As you can see with this vote, elections do have consequences! Let’s not let them turn Pennsylvania into Wisconsin, no matter how many Koch-loving hacks we have in the state house: An attempt to pass a controversial amendment to a bill that would restrict union dues collection from state and school employees’ paychecks narrowly failed […]

So, Utah decided to just give the homeless places to live. The results are what anyone with sense, or who has followed the topic would expect: Utah’s Housing First program cost between $10,000 and $12,000 per person, about half of the $20,000 it cost to treat and care for homeless people on the street. Imagine [...]

Mr. Obama is fast becoming the past, not the future, for donors, activists and Democratic strategists. Party leaders are increasingly turning toward Mrs. Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, as Democrats face difficult races this fall in states where the president is especially unpopular, and her aides are making plain that she has no intention of running for “Obama’s third term.”

Thank goodness for that. I don’t think I can take another four years of careless conservatism spouting from the mouths of clueless young Ivy League males. We have been waiting for six long years to hear what Clinton really thinks about Obama. Yeah, it was great that she was able to swallow her pride and anger and play nice for the sake of “unity” but enough’s enough. Even if she doesn’t run, I am looking forward to her informed critique.

I especially like the bit where Clinton says “ ‘Don’t do stupid stuff’ is not an organizing principle,”

Amen to that.

I am desperate to hear someone talk about their organizing principles. No, I am not kidding. That “put everything on the table and we’ll negotiate” crap has been an utter disaster. And like Katiebird, I’d like the conversation to move away from foreign policy to economics.

On the other hand, this is probably not the best way to raise a lot of money from political donors who want to retain their iron grip on all the money in the universe. Let’s hope Clinton can convince some of them that it’s in their best interests.

The Party, on the other hand, seems to think this is still 2008 before the crash:

Christine Pelosi, a longtime Democratic activist and daughter of the House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, said her phone and email “just exploded” after Mrs. Clinton’s remarks.

“Now is not the time to second guess the commander in chief, particularly when you’re a former member of his cabinet and national security team,” Ms. Pelosi said.

Oooo, really? And when would the best time be, Christine? I mean, he’s already opened up the tax payer safe to the finance industry, took a backseat to the foreclosure crisis and long term unemployment, presided over the dismantling of our research and development sector, and locked us into a two tier class system when it comes to health insurance. When is any Democrat allowed to criticize him? No one ever gave Bill Clinton that kind of deference.

Anyway, here’s to a little high tension. It’s about fricking time.

Additional thoughts: We were the target of a troll attack yesterday. It was wildly fun, by the way. Katiebird and I are just warming up. Bring it on. But we did wonder what the heck triggered it. It reminded both of us of the days in 2008 when the Obot trolls fired barrage after barrage from different IP addresses. In fact, we both thought it was a good idea that we hadn’t gotten rid of those addresses in the banned list for the spam filter. Now, we can go through the IPs at our leisure and figure out if there’s a common thread.

But it does make us wonder, why bother? Obama isn’t running for another term, we don’t have nearly the readership that we had in 2008 when we peaked at something like 56000 hits/per day. And the left has not sought to deign us with the pleasure of their revenue stream by adding us to their blog rolls. In fact, I’d say we were true blue all the way through the last six years but hardly worth the effort and attention.

And yet, in spite of our anonymity compared to 2008, we still seem relevant enough to send a bunch of psych-out shock troops. We can’t dismiss the possibility of a Republican attack but yesterday’s seemed so familiar. It left that whiff of O-zone behind it.

I was so freaked out that I did something I hadn’t done since college: I joined a protest outside Clinton’s Manhattan office. No dice. Then, I emailed every single person I knew to send me a letter opposing the war. I printed them all out and overnight fedexed them to Clinton’s office in DC.

We call on the Democrats in Congress to oppose a war on Iraq, to vote “No” to Bush’s war cries. We pledge to never again vote for any Democratic member of Congress who supports George W. Bush’s war against Iraq. To the Democrats in Congress, we give you fair warning: You are either with us, or you are fired.

[…]

I did not support Clinton in 2008 for the presidency. As for 2016, unless there is a serious chance that a Republican would beat her, I will honor my signature on Moore’s petition.

I saw Hillary Clinton’s statement on her vote on the Senate floor and it didn’t sound like “gobbledygook and some of the most twisted rationalizations I have ever read”. No, I give that honor to John Kerry’s overly long statement on the Senate floor regarding the same resolution.

I think Clinton’s motives were pretty clear and I’m not going to rehash them here nor will I apologize for her. I was as adamantly against going to Iraq as Tristero and Michael Moore. You can ask my immediate family. They were hung-ho, Hadji kicking, peeing in their beds in terror over Muslims coming to kill them lunatics. We split up over it.

But I do have a problem with this sanctimonious “Lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine” bull from Tristero.

How come you guys were so Ok with turning the primary season of 2008 into a pro forma affair? I hold the vote as one of the most sacred institutions in the country. You know what happened. Without integrity in the voting process, it doesn’t matter if you go to war or not. The bad guys have already won.

Going into 2016, are we entirely sure we are going to have an honest primary season where a candidate that Tristero can bring himself to support has a chance of actually winning? Will that vote actually count for anything? I used to be a PUMA but consider myself a Democrat in Exile since the general election of 2008. Hillary Clinton has to prove herself all over again. My vote is not automatic. Will I have a chance to get counted this time, because Jon Corzine gave my primary vote away in 2008 in some kind of negotiated parley with the DNC that sounded like “gobbledygook and some of the most twisted rationalizations I have ever read” and I consider that the worst thing that has happened in American politics since Watergate.

I will defend Tristero’s right to vote for any self-righteous, preening, “Yes We Can!”, supposedly anti-war candidate he wants in 2016. Will Tristero allow me the same right to vote for whoever I want? Or is he going to call me a racist, stupid, and uneducated when I have a different set of priorities and set much higher standards for qualifications? Does my vote for “It’s the economy, stupid” have equal standing with Tristero’s desire to live like Gandhi? Will it be OK once more to just ignore my wishes and trash my vote because Tristero and his friends know better than I do what my priorities should be? What if I decide that women’s rights are more important this election cycle than LGBT rights? Will that be Ok? If we’re going to get a bunch of lefties crying and holding their breaths this early in the election cycle, it’s time we pushed back hard because they threw a fit and got their way in 2008.

And because of that, we got the most untested, overly ambitious, unready, president in the middle of the greatest economic catastrophe in 80 years. I and many of my former colleagues are still paying for that and will continue to pay for that in terms of diminished wages and savings until the day we die. Our children will pay for that. Women in general have been paying for that. Is there an American woman alive who can genuinely say that the misogynism unleashed by Democrats in the 2008 campaign season hasn’t affected them? And it was all very, VERY predictable. We predicted it throughout the campaign season with some very good logic and observation.

I can think of a lot of “the most dangerously stupid policy decisions any American president ever made”. For example, pulling out of Iraq before the country was stabilized in order to placate a bunch of noisy Tristeros before the 2012 election was dangerously stupid. Making Tim Geithner Secretary of the Treasury was dangerously stupid. After all, he’s the one who wrote the actual blank check for the finance industry in the form of trillions of our tax dollars. If we face another economic catastrophe because the financiers took greater risks, I’d say that was dangerously stupid. Bailing on homeowners might not feel so bad to Tristero but I’m sure the kids who lost their houses when the banks foreclosed on their parents would see it differently. There are a lot of dangerously stupid policy decisions that Obama has made that are going to affect all of us and make us a weaker nation for generations to come. But those decisions? Not a peep from Tristero and people like him.

We all have our lines in the sand. Tristero thought the war in Iraq was his, though I suspect he was pretty OK with voting for John Kerry in 2004. Can Tristero honestly look at us in the face and say that he held John Kerry to the same standard in 2004 as he holds Hillary Clinton in 2016? Call me very skeptical.

And I have mine. To me, anyone who schemes to deprive voters of their choices, substituting his judgement for theirs, doesn’t get my support. Ever. Because I don’t know who is behind that kind of sacrilege and nothing good comes from a bad seed.

Messing with the vote is evil.

One final thought: There seems to be some misperception out there that I am totally onboard with Hillary and I’m just being coy and my past as a PUMA just proves it. That would be wrong.

I’m not the head of any group and I don’t have any connections to the campaign. No one has approached me to officially or unofficially support a candidate. Maybe it’s too early for that anyway but in any case, I wouldn’t know how it’s done because I was never solicited in the past. All of my statements were purely voluntarily and not under the control of any candidate. I’m sure that didn’t always help the candidate but that’s what has happened in the past. I liked my independence.

Yeah, I could use ad money. I have tuition to pay and I’m a lot less financially secure than I was in 2008. I don’t have a good job with benefits anymore. I’m human and I would be sorely tempted. But what I really want more than anything else is a full time job making decent money, and health insurance that doesn’t cost me my entire paycheck and, in my opinion, the economy is in such desperate need of liberal economic policies that I am willing to wipe my slate clean and start with a fresh pair of eyes when it comes to candidates for 2016.

So, Hillary has to prove herself to me just like any other candidate. If she is a worthy candidate, she wouldn’t want it any other way.

This is an invitation to the politicians out there to answer this question. Why are Americans expected to tolerate exploitative profit mining by the wealthy and well connected? Why are we supposed to just sit here like crops to be harvested? As soon as there is even a teensy bit of disposable income, that we are supposed to sock away for the future, some capitalist on steroids has to find a way of siphoning it off for his own use and profit.

We all know the game is rigged and yet we’re expected to put all of our precious savings in the stock market or in the hands of fund managers or pay a steep tax penalty to cover our living expenses if we have the misfortune to suffer periods of extended unemployment before we turn 59.5.

We’re all expected to get a college degree if we have even a prayer of getting a good job but then we are tied to these monstrous student loan debts or we spend years pursuing a PhD in a difficult subject only to find we have to take a series of $37K/year jobs.

We’re all expected to pony up hundreds and thousands of dollars for lousy health care policies and an ACA that has separated the country’s workers into two classes. But the minute we ask for a fairer system that imposes cost controls on medical costs and profit limits on insurers, you’d think we were being irreligious. Same with internet providers who can’t be bothered to improve their infrastructure even while they intend to reduce competition and split the proceeds from mergers amongst their shareholders. Apparently, there is no one in Congress or the executive branch who thinks it is possible to stop what consumers think of as destructive mergers and loss of net neutrality. Why are we expected to put up with that?

Every business and industry has figured out how to extract the maximum amount of pain and we rely on Congress to help us have a say in the matter and they do nothing to stop the extraction.

There’s got to be a better reason than the fact that campaign finance reform is broken. We want answers as to why we are expected to tolerate the intolerable.

It’s one damn thing after another and no one is buying the excuse that nothing can be done because of the Republicans. We’ve been watching this unfold for more than a decade and we haven’t even seen you Democrats putting up much of a fight.

Why does exploitative profit mining seem so unstoppable among the politicians that we elected to keep the playing field level so that we can all benefit from the fruits of our labors?

We want answers. Feel free to use the comment thread below to provide them. I think we have a right to expect a response of some kind.

Come on, Al Franken. We supported you from the beginning. What say you? How about you, Elizabeth Warren? And you, Hillary Clinton? Enough of the foreign policy. We want to hear about domestic issues. What are you going to do about this?

Jane Caro is a former advertising executive and now a public speaker in Australia. Her presentations cover many topics but she’s particularly outspoken about politics, education and feminism. Some of you might remember a former video of hers on how politicians can gain the trust of their constituents. I think it might be this one where Caro was one of 4 panelists talking about political spin from an advertising branding point of view. Pick her up at minute marker 19:00-ish.*

This latest one is about feminism and not being “nice”. According to Caro, and our own site statistics, we must have been doing something right in 2008 because the push back, name calling and ostracism was ferocious. She also makes a point about women on the internet that I have been trying to emphasize for some years now. When it comes to the blogosphere, the internet is the best friend women ever had. It is the great equalizer. Yeah, your potential allies can leave you off their blog rolls and the trolls can be hostile pains in the asses. But they can’t shut you down. Nope, you can go on saying one irritating thing after another and if you don’t like the comments you get, well, they’re just pixels on a monitor. They can not hurt you.

Anyway, enjoy the latest from Jane Caro.

I found Caro’s eight rules of political branding. Before the purists out there get all bent out of shape that using advertising is somehow “dirty” in politics, know that to get elected, you need to advertise yourself and show the voters that your services are worth purchasing for a length of time. Politicians that do not advertise do not get elected. It goes with the territory. Here are the Eight Rules:

1.) Underpromise and overdeliver.
2.) Be voter centered. Convince your voters that you put them first. Take risks in defense of what you believe even if it may cost you personally.
3.) Don’t sacrifice what your core voters always liked about you to buy new voters.
4.) All voting decisions are made emotionally and then post-rationalized. There are two emotions that change behavior: Hope and Fear. If you want to change behaviors, get to know what are the voters’ hopes and fears.
5.) While voting decisions are made emotionally and are post-rationalized, you must give voters ammunition to defend their choice.
Policy is important.
6.) Raise voters’ morale and your own. We want to vote for people who look like they want the job and once they’ve got the job, look like they love the job.
7.) Lower voter anxiety about YOU.
8.) Voters want politicians to love their constituency.

I’m embellishing a comment I made in the last thread and moving it up to the front page.

This is not specifically about Netroots Nation and Markos Moulitsos, the founder of DailyKos, and why he won’t go to Arizona next year. However, I went to the first two YearlyKos events so I can comment on this whether they like it or not. The first YearlyKos in Las Vegas was amazing. The second was just weird in ways I can’t even describe. The “vibe” was off and I started to feel coerced in a way that was not dissimilar to the kind of emotional manipulation you might find in a fundy evangelical tent revival meeting. It was deeply unsettling. So, maybe I knew after YearlyKos2 that I didn’t really belong anymore.

For the presidential campaigns of 2016, Kos should STFU. Seriously, it was Kos that forced us (Clintonistas posting at DailyKos) out of our tribe and then lead the social psychology storm troopers to quellstiflesmother kill dissent on the left. If I recall correctly, he referred to us as a “shrieking band of paranoid holdouts”, or something to that effect. (Katiebird may remember the lovely term of endearment better than I can) Let’s examine Kos’s moral authority to make pronouncements about 2016.

Did Kos support Florida and Michigan voters in 2008? Um, no.

Was Kos a Hispanic leader defending the rights of primary voters who were locked out of Texas caucus sites? Um, no.

Did he defend the little old ladies who were silenced in Kansas? How about the primary votes in NJ that were handed over to Obama at the convention without so much as a “by your leave” by that paragon of virtue, Jon Corzine? Did he question the precedent the Democrats were setting when the most successful female candidate in the history of American politics was humiliated by being denied a legitimate role call vote at the convention?

No, No and, most emphatically, No.

His behavior was egregious and extraordinarily un-democratic in 2008 but no one challenged him. Well, WE did but then his flying monkeys accused us of racism.

So, I’m sure that Kos now flatters himself as a man of principle by refraining from entering Arizona. But he sold those principles to the highest bidder in 2008 giving us a president who I am convinced will go down in history as the Nero of our republic. In the process, he helped to invalidate the primary system, promoted the ends justifying the means, and allowed misogynism of the most vile and opportunistic kind to flourish on his blog.

So, fuck Kos with a 2″ diameter test tube brush.

He’s done enough damage. The best thing for Democrats to do is to get the hell out of the way and let people have choices in 2016. A legitimate primary where real issues are discussed in detail by women who are familiar with policy, and can extrapolate policy outcomes, would be a very good thing. The party’s obsession with trying to decide what is the best for us (and I am being generous with my words here) backfired stupendously in 2008. It needs to back off now.

Just stop tinkering with the election process. Most Democratic voters know who is going to work for them. They don’t need to be corralled like sheep.

Update2: Maybe it doesn’t matter whether Kos attends Netroots Nation. But we should never forget the atmosphere that he created in 2008 or dismiss the idea that it can’t happen again. It can if we aren’t vigilant. IMHO, Democrats should start with a fresh slate in 2016 (not necessarily fresh candidates) and evaluate candidates more dispassionately than they did in 2008. (yes, I know I’m dreaming) As far as I can see, we did not learn our lessons and safeguards are not in place in the primary system or online to prevent a repeat.

A few months ago, I said I would be revisiting the topic of narcissists. It might have been Phillip Zimbardo’s book, The Lucifer Effect, that lead me to read more on narcissism and malignant narcissism. Or maybe it was one of those moments that we all have from time to time when something we see that is out of focus suddenly snaps into place. I had interactions with many narcissists last year in every possible area of my life. The one at work was particularly awful. But whatever it was that finally clued me in, I realized how narcissism has been allowed to run amok.

We all have the capacity for narcissism. Most healthy human beings have to be somewhat narcissistic to survive. In this economic environment, we have all been pushed a bit further on the spectrum because a false sense of scarcity has been created and we are all competing for the same piece of the pie. It pays to be more selfish, to project more confidence and talent than we actually have, and to adopt an “every woman for herself” attitude. But most of us do not have Narcissistic Personality Disorder, a way of seeing the rest of the world as merely actors in the play we wrote ourselves and are directing.

Here are the characteristics of people with Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD):

A grandiose sense of self-importance (may be shown as an exaggeration of abilities and talents, expectation that he or she will be seen as superior to all others).

Is obsessed with him- or herself.

Goals are almost always selfish and self-motivated.

Has troubles with healthy, normal relationships.

Becomes furious if criticized.

Has fantasies of unbound success, power, intelligence, love, and beauty.

Believes that he or she is unique and special, and therefore should only hang out with other special, high-status people.

Requires extreme admiration for everything.

Feels entitled – has unreasonable expectations of special treatment.

Takes advantage of others to further his or her own needs.

Has zero empathy – cannot (or will not) recognize the feelings of others.

May be envious of others or believe that others are envious of him or her.

Based on the number of politically tone deaf statements from the plutocrats about how the rest of us envy their success, it has become painfully obvious that there is a surplus of narcissists at the top. But you might be surprised by how many people with NPD hide behind religion. A very religious person is very hard to criticize and our social structure gives them a convenient cover screen. How could a person who praises the lord and loves Jesus (and lets you know about it all. the. time.) be selfish, manipulative and malicious? It’s a brilliant place to be if you want control but want to come off looking sweet and pious while simultaneously believing that you are superior to others because you have The Truth. Many cult-like and high control fundamentalist religious organizations encourage this kind of narcissism in their converts. The Duggar family is a perfect example of this mindset.

And then there is the right wing noise machine that seems to encourage a base narcissism in its target audience. The unlucky “deserve” what they get while the rich “deserve” what they’ve gotten. And what’s wrong with saying things that are racist? You’re allowed to be a racist if you want to be. (I’m just paraphrasing the incredible things I’m hearing from the Fox News crowd lately. Personally, I think racism is revolting in thought, word and deed.) Putting people down to make yourself look superior is a hallmark of a narcissist, although I doubt that these same Fox News watchers would be as comfortable saying it’s Ok to be anti-semitic. Just a guess.

The relationships that develop in a family poisoned by a narcissistic parent illustrate on a micro scale what can be projected to a wider audience in the political sphere. In a family when one of the parents has narcissistic personality disorder, the children in the family are frequently pitted against one another. The NPD parent designates one of the children as the scapegoat. The role of the scapegoat may rotate but it’s usually one particular child that is targeted. This child is usually the more sensitive child, the one who doesn’t play the game and flatter the narcissist, the truth teller. When the NPD parent injures this child using emotional manipulation and encouraging the others in the family to “mob” (bullying by group), the NPD parent gets a whiff of narcissistic supply. They get off on control and their ability to make someone else feel inferior, to sabotage and limit their success. The goal of the NPD parent is to make the scapegoat bend to her will by using ostracism, mockery, malicious gossip and alienation. Yeah, imagine living with that.

The golden child, on the other hand, can do no wrong. No matter how much the kid screws up, the NPD parent will make excuses. It’s not his fault. The problem started before he came along. He needs time to mature. He will never suffer the consequences of his behavior nor will there be any criticism of his limitations. Indeed, any minor accomplishment is made to look magnificent.

And then there are the flying monkeys. Flying monkeys are the siblings, and others, who act as the hit men for the NPD parent. They are sent on missions to obtain information from the scapegoat that gets reported back to the NPD parent. The parent then uses that information to spread rumors, gossip and malicious mockery through his or her own actions or the actions of the flying monkeys. The gossip may contain a hint of truth but this is usually blown out of proportion. The more voices that propagate the gossip, the greater the negative effect on the scapegoat.

So, here’s my leap from micro to macro and what we will be subjected to for the next two years until the presidential election. The narcissists are in charge. They control the horizontal and the vertical. All the moneys are belong to them and they are determined to extract every penny of what they think they are owed. They will do this by conscripting the US government to cover their debts even if it means impoverishing the tax base. They don’t see labor as consisting of real people. Labor is a resource to be used when it is needed and discarded when it is not.

I’d like to use the term exploitative profit mining to describe the effect of unfettered narcissistic capitalism on the general public and predict that this will continue to result in economic instability and eventually, the dangerous undermining of democratic governments. The early and mid 20th century saw the negative fallout of this kind of behavior with WWI, the Great Depression and WWII. I’d hate to think we are going to have to live through those kinds of upheavals again but the rise of ultra right wing and nationalistic parties in Europe in the wake of austerity, as well as the political chaos caused by the Tea Party fanatics here in the US have me very worried that we’re headed for trouble.

Over the past 6 years, we have become all too familiar with the typical behaviors and attitudes of narcissists. Do not look to them for any sense of empathy. They do not possess it and the only mechanisms for keeping them in check have been abandoned at this point. Check out any review of Tim Geithner’s book, Stress Test, if you want to know what he, the lieutenant of the narcissists, did on their behalf. Keep in mind the characteristics of narcissists as you read it.

Their most significant triumph to date has been to get their golden child elected. The scapegoat is Hillary Clinton. Look at any comment section of a left leaning blog and you will find this is true. Obama inherited the financial crisis. That’s why the economy sucks. The Republicans hate Obama. That’s why the ACA is FUBAR. Obama didn’t start the war in Iraq. So, it’s not his fault if the void we left when we pulled out of Iraq has destabilized the country.

Hillary can do nothing right. Everything she says is scrutinized in order to put the worst possible spin on it. She’s not perfect, that’s for sure, and right now, unless I see her move to the left boldly to take on the exploitative profit miners, it will be hard for me to justify voting for her. But, golly gee, nobody is as bad as the left seems to think Hillary is. According to the left, she and her husband wrecked welfare and imposed an unconstitutional piece of legislation on gay people while single handedly destroying Glass-Steagall. Then they wickedly danced around the fire while chanting incantations, laughing evilly at the suffering of others and killing the bees. It’s an image of the Clintons that completely cuts out the crazy Whitewater scandal, the crazy Monica scandal, the hours of congressional hearings and special prosecutions over billing records, and the millions of dollars that they and their friends and everyone who ever worked for them were forced to spend on what turned out to be harassment suits. This during the Newt Gingrich years. Remember Newt??

But it doesn’t matter. Hillary Clinton is facing flying monkeys on the left as well as the right. And while we can’t do anything about the flying monkeys on the right, I just have to wonder if the flying monkeys on the left have thought this through. The books I’ve read say that the flying monkeys are not always aware of what they are doing. The narcissists controlling them make them feel included, like they’re one of the club. And it’s fun to get that sip of narcissistic oxygen that comes with watching the scapegoat flailing and not succeeding.

There’s a danger to this though. If Hillary truly is the last great hope of the left in 2016, and she sees that the narcissists and flying monkeys on the left are determined to see her fail, then her only choice to win the White House is to appeal to the disaffected voters of 2008 who abandoned the Democrats for the Tea Party. That wouldn’t be me. I’m still in exile. I’m talking about the more socially conservative Democrats who felt snubbed by Obama and his supporters writing them off, calling them religious, gun toting, bitter knitters. She’s got to get her votes from somewhere and if the crunchy lefties and snobby lefties are going to get prodded by the narcissists to go after her non-stop from now until 2016, then she’s going to have to appeal to the Reagan Democrats. At this point, the left is all but conceding that she is the inevitable candidate (why they say this is anyone’s guess but it’s out there). And if it is true that the left is finally, reluctantly, going to get behind Hillary, it’s going to be undermining its own candidate if it keeps telling the world how loathsome it thinks she is.

That’s something to think about.

On the other hand, Hillary has to come to terms with her scapegoat role. Once you have become the scapegoat, there is virtually nothing you can do about changing it. Defensiveness doesn’t do much good. The scapegoating will continue until the narcissist dies or the flying monkeys get a clue as to how and why they are being used. As long as the flying monkeys are getting off on what they’re doing, finding it successful, and the golden child remains protected, don’t expect anything to change. The scapegoat has a choice. Go along with it or divorce the whole family. You can never appease the narcissist enough to be your own person.

Or should I say, the stupid racist menopausal uneducated working class sino-peruvian lesbians are back. It’s very weird how the Democrats manage to mine the data and come up with this constituency over and over again. It’s a distortion that kinda-sorta proves the point of the Mad Men post I wrote yesterday. Computers can be extraordinarily useful but they also tend to be levelers. There are descriptors that the guys (and they are almost always guys) did not collect before they ran their analysis. Now, they may have enough information to get enough PUMAs to the polls in November but THIS former PUMA, and I suspect many others, will be a much tougher sell. But first, let’s try to clarify what we mean by Clinton voter and PUMA.

From my own perspective, the acronym PUMA, Party Unity My Ass, was only useful through the 2008 election season. I was a New Deal Liberal style Democrat who voted for Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996. Unlike a lot of younger Democrats, I have a completely different and more realistic understanding of what the Clintons were up to back then. I’m a late baby boomer who didn’t benefit from the earlier baby boomers’ advantages. I was a working mother back in 1992 and I strongly identified with Hillary Clinton. I saw “ending welfare as we know it” as a very good thing because the idea was only part of a strategy to introduce more of a European style welfare state with a national health policy, educational training, child care and housing. It was all part of a package deal. Then I saw both the Democratic party and the Republican party pick that package to bits. The Democrats helped deep six the healthcare initiatives and Newt Gingrich’s Contract On America destroyed welfare. That’s what happened guys. You might have been studying and partying. The rest of us were living in a grown up world. As for NAFTA, I’m sorry, I think it’s a good idea to remove trade barriers between your two closest neighbors. I had problems with some of the details but in general, these were Republican insertions, not Clinton’s.

We can talk about Glass-Steagel and Robert Rubin if you like. In retrospect, deregulation of the banks and derivatives, etc, was a pretty bad thing but it was also an unstoppable phenomenon. Clinton was NOT the driving force behind these initiatives. From what I can recall, Phil Gramm was the nasty on the TV all the time ramming this crap down our throats. Go look it up. To this day, I avoid Texas just so I don’t have to run into that drawl.

Ok, so that’s my background. You can read my credo in the tabs to find out what I value, and from the site statistics, someone(s) has become very interested in those values of late.

Now, when I say PUMA was only a 2008 thing, that means that to ME, after the election was over, it lost its meaning as a resistance movement. The Democratic party lost me. I officially rescinded my membership in the party in 2008 and only re-registered as a Democrat in PA last year when I applied for a new driver’s license here in PA after my move. In PA, the primaries are closed so voters are forced to choose a party when they register to vote, unlike NJ where the semi-closed primary means you can choose a party on primary election day. I think anyone who reads my credo will see that I am a liberal New Deal style Democrat but my party affiliation, in spite of my registration, is very tenuous. In other words, if a third party came around that represented my views, I’d jump in an instant. Also note that I’m not a fan of the Greens and don’t particularly care for the crunchy type’s irrational condemnation of GMO crops, vaccines, pharmaceuticals, nuclear energy and corporations. I find some of the left to be as black and white in their thinking as the right and, frankly, I am losing patience debating the “religious” beliefs of both sides. I’m also not a selfish short sighted Libertarian. That’s where the rebels without a cause hang out. And you will never catch me voting for Republican ever again. My one vote for McCain in 2008 was purely a protest vote against the Democratic party because of its unethical treatment of its own party voters in 2008. It was not an expression of support for the Republican party or its cavalier, cruel, heartless, greedy, narcissistically malignant, lying, deceptive, destructive platform of “ideas”.

It was very upsetting to pull that lever and I will never forgive the Democratic party for pushing me to make that decision for a couple of important reasons. First, I was deprived of an identity and second, I was deprived of voting for the first African-American for president. But in my very important opinion, voting for the first ANYTHING was not a sufficient excuse to overlook or condone the party for rigging the primary and compromising what the party stood for. Some Democrats were able to overcome their moral resistance to what the party was asking them to do. I could not. That’s what made me a PUMA and also explains why PUMA lost its utility after the election. I felt that that what was required to fix what was broken was something bigger, more organized and longer lasting than a slogan. And then real life intervened and I couldn’t devote any time to it.

But PUMA did survive in another form on other blogs. I can’t endorse these other PUMA blogs. I have a sense that they were compromised by Tea Party and Republican operatives. There was an irrational embrace of birtherism and a weird support for Sarah Palin. This blog struggled with some of those holdouts for awhile until their presence got to be unbearable. These are the people that I think EJ Dionne is referring to in his post. What I think they have in common is their extreme anger at what happened to them in 2008. They were completely ignored by the Democrats who circular filed their votes and topped it off with a smug, “we’re smarter and know what’s best for you, you ignorant working class ‘gits” attitude.

Oh really? Those PUMAs who are still fuming on the Tea Party friendly blogs may not have Ivy League degrees or know someone who works in a “creative class” field but when it comes right down to it, the election of Barack Obama has done more to solidify the strangle hold of the oligarchs on the American public than any previous president we have ever had. We have actually devolved as a progressive nation. I will go so far as to say that Obama’s presidency has sped up that devolution. You could argue that Hillary Clinton wouldn’t have been different but my intuition (which hasn’t failed me yet in this whole mess) tells me that you would be wrong. In any case, when it comes right down to it, the “creative class” that got fooled into voting for Obama in 2008 and 2012 is no different from the working class voters it dismissed so senselessly. To the oligarchs, you might as well be living on a rice paddy in Bangladesh. Your ultimate fate is no different than the bitter gun toting church goers in rural Pennsylvania. You can be economically ruined and made politically impotent just as easily. That truth is just now dawning on you as you read The Divide and Piketty’s Capital and the latest study that says you don’t have enough money to make a dent in the lobbying shield wall of the 1%.

As for me, I don’t know if I would support Clinton in 2016. My sense is that so much has happened to fundamentally change the nature of our country in the past 20 years that there would have to be a personality much bigger and more visionary than Clinton’s to drag us back onto the right track. Could she do it? Maybe. But maybe she also recognizes the political landscape that she would be entering. I saw her evolve during the primary season. She was forged by fire and was gaining momentum when the party cut her off. That was a mistake the party made out of fear but it made it prematurely. By September of 2008, Elmer Fudd could have gotten elected as the first cartoon Democratic president, the situation was that dire. In a sense, the election of Barack Obama was not a triumph of identity politics as much as it was one of panic and desperation. But I have no doubt that under Hillary Clinton, there would have been more rehab and less codependence.

Slightly off topic, I find it interesting that so many people on both the right and the left are ramping up their anti-Hillary rhetoric. Those Democrats who are still on the fence about her should take a moment to think about what’s going on there. Both parties are pawns of the oligarchs right now. And someone in the Democratic party has pushing hard on the idea that if we just let Obama have his 2 terms, we could have Hillary in 2016. That push acknowledges two things: 1.)People want someone to do something already and they’ve decided that the most likely person is Hillary and 2.) if you treat voters like children and make them delay their gratification, you can make them focus on some future uncertain reward while taking their minds off what they can do to help their own desperate situations in the present. Whatever the left is currently spewing about how bad the Clintons are bears a striking similarity to the right’s mindless invectives against them to me. And that suggests that there are some very powerful people who do not want Hillary to be the next president. If she were already in the pockets of these very powerful people, you would expect less vilification, wouldn’t you? Think about it.

In the meantime, I will leave you with this link to Phillip Zimbardo’s steps for overcoming situational influence. The Democratic activist base should have read this before they flattered themselves that they were not at all like Kansas and couldn’t be fooled into doing anything against their own best interests. I only recently discovered these steps but I think I’ve been wise to them since YearlyKos 2007 in Chicago when something just didn’t seem right.

As to the Democrats winning the election in 2014 and 2016, I’m almost getting to the point where it doesn’t feel like it will make a difference which party wins in November. Having the Democrats in charge only slows down the slide to the right. It doesn’t stop it. And as destructive as the slide might be, I see very little evidence that the Democrats are motivated to prevent if from happening. In fact, the dangerous collapse of the Republicans into crazyville only makes it easier for the oligarchs to get just about anything they want from the Democrats with very little effort. Like I said before, I would gladly jump to a third party that is more responsive to my values. At this point, appealing to me as a former PUMA is probably a waste of time because I see what I am to the party- a faceless data point projected onto a latent structure.

When the party starts treating me like an enfranchised citizen again, then we’ll talk.

Body: This paper, or pre-draft, or sketch, or whatever it is, started out with this title: "With The 12-Point Platform, this won't happen: An aristocracy of credentialism in the 20%." But then I realized I'd gotten in deeper than I thought -- one of those posts were the framework and the notes overwhelm the original idea -- and as it tur […]

This is a big bunch of catch-up, here, 'cause it's been a helluva few weeks. Gaius Publius interviewed Alan Grayson on Virtually Speaking, where Grayson discussed "how he 'cracked the nut' that allows him to get progressive legislation passed. Part of his secret - his goal is to be a person who 'gets things done for the progress […]